Lifestyle

In the two years before I retired, I put “write myself a job description for my retirement” on a list. Retirement, for those keeping score, is the part where you don’t have a job. The list lived on my phone, in a note called Elaine’s Retirement. It had 14 sections, because apparently my retirement required the same scope as my 1994 dissertation. Spiritual, Hobbies, Creativity…

Growing into my wisdom each year, I have noticed the desire for ease and simplicity. It wasn’t always like this. I spent many years wasting my energy and time worrying about things that I couldn’t control and really didn’t matter…

I’m a horror movie fan, so when the new Insidious movie came out this weekend, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in a long time. I went to a movie theater. And I was genuinely excited. Not just interested or casually looking forward to it. I was excited like a little kid. I got my popcorn, found my seat, settled in, and for a moment, I realized just how much this simple experience meant to me…

As a full-time caregiver, it’s not that easy to slip away for a vacation or even slip out of the house for an hour or two but I have found I can take frequent breaks throughout the day to a lovely little inn on the Washington coast. Just a few quiet moments to smell the salty air and hear the seagulls arguing over who got the biggest crumb from a discarded…

How do you create a lifestyle after 60 that is sensual, vibrant, fulfilling, and on your own terms and not someone else’s? What if I said the answer is healing from the traumatic effects of people pleasing? If this is true, where do you begin to identify the effects of people pleasing? And how do you start to genuinely heal from them?

When I think back to being a kid, so much of what we did was simply because it was fun. We spent hours outside, running up and down the road to the big black door at the back of William Patten School. Nobody actually used that entrance, but for us it became a focal point. Other days were spent dancing around the kitchen table, clicking our fingers to “The Jets”…

People sometimes talk about turning 60 as if it is the beginning of slowing down. I see it differently. For me, it has been a time to look at everything I have learned, everything I have survived, and everything I still want to do, and ask, “What can I build now?” I have built twice before, and both times I stepped into something unfamiliar…

I have been guilty of downloading apps because they were on someone’s list of “Top 5 Useful Apps for Women Over 50,” only to never open them again. But there are a handful of apps I use regularly because they actually do remove friction, solve a problem or make life easier in some way. Rather than simply recommending apps, I thought I’d share how I decide whether an app is actually useful to me…

The money is handled. You met with the advisor, ran the numbers, and the date is coming into view. You did the responsible thing. The question that’s harder to answer, the one that comes up when someone asks what you’ll do with all that time in retirement, is who you’re going to be once the title is gone…

Are we living in the Age of Loneliness? In a 2023 81-page report from the Office of the Surgeon General, titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” the United States Surgeon General stated, “…we are now finding that one in two adults report measurable levels of loneliness.”